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Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

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Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#311
post #252
post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is called "What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away."

and this is now called Electron trading speed of development with 'hardware optimization'. Mac being a small market, some users are still opiniated/loud enough to reward nicer/native UI vs cross-ish platform lowest common denominator UI. Maybe there is hope Arm mac stays fast.

I would say that 90% of my pc resources are consumed to execute JavaScript code. If we need dedicated hardware to execute this more efficiently so be it. We do it anyway for so many other domains. Video, graphics, encryption etc.

Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#312

Somewhere, the collective whos who of the silicon chip world is shitting their pants. Apple just showed to the world how powerful and efficient processors can be. All that with good design. Customers are going to demand more from Intel and the likes. Just imagine Apple releasing the Mx chips for server infrastructure. Intel ought to be sweating bullets now. edit: a word.

Give Mac software a few years to "catch up" and everything will feel just as slow as usual (and I'm not even joking, so far, software was always excellent at undoing any advancements in hardware very quickly).

I feel like things have felt pretty good in the PC world since NVMe SSDs and approximately Sandy Bridge.

But, I do agree that there is a lot of jank in software that we write these days. Over the weekend I started writing an application that uses glfx + dear imgui, running on a 360Hz monitor. The lack of latency was incredible. I think it's something that people don't even know is possible, so they don't even attempt to get it. But once you know, everything else feels kind of shitty. This comment box in a web browser just feels ... off.

Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#313
post #18
post #6

If Apple is having this kind of success, it seems they should look to compete in the data center with this or the following generation of chips. I wonder if it is a good time to invest in Apple.

What's in it for Apple? I'm not trying to be glib, here, but unless there were some Mac only server functionality, nobody would buy an Apple ARM powered datacentre machine.

They get a gigantic boost in internal datacenter performance if they can jam a bunch of Apple Silicon chips into a rack mounted server and boot Linux on it. If they can get a similar boost in performance at lower power efficiency in the chip that is going in the Mac Pro, taking that chip and putting it on a board with Ethernet and Power wouldn't be a ton of engineering cost and then they could massively reduce the power consumption and cooling costs of the datacenters.

And then they could resell the box they designed as a server, either with Linux support out of the box (unlikely, but since in this mystical scenario they'd have to write kernel patches for Linux to get it to boot...) or with a build of macOS that could be set up headlessly, in order to recoup the development costs. Apple shops that want machines to run Compressor or Xcode's build server would eat that up.

Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#314

I really want the next MacBook Pro to support driving two 4K monitors over thunderbolt and have an option to buy 32 gigs of ram.

I would prefer just one 6K or 8K monitor personally at a size of say 55" with a wide ratio. Simpler setup. No post in the middle. Something like this but bigger with higher resolution, and maybe a bit more height vertically (this one is a bit too wide for its height in my opinion): https://www.samsung.com/ca/monitors/gaming/super-ultra-wide-... I think that dual 4K is the old way, single 6K/8K ultra wides are the fut…

I much prefer two monitors. I run each one as separate desktops, which means I can have "left screen apps" and "right screen apps" and cycle them independently. It also means I can switch desktops on my left screen while my apps on my right screen stay where they are.

Also, with two screens, I can adjust the angle between them to be more or less severe.

Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don’t run Electron apps, even an older Mac will fly. My 2015 is still astoundingly fast, it just doesn’t have Chrome bogging it down.

You can even go back to 2013 and not notice that you’re using a 7-8 year old machine. A MacBook Pro from late 2013 runs Big Sur and performs fine for most everyday use use case and any development work that doesn’t require an IDE. You just can’t run Chrome all the well, which should tell you more about Chrome than Macs.

I do all my work (java/postgres etc) on a 2012 i7 Mac Mini. It used to be my home media server but I started using it as a "temporary machine" last year after killing my 2018 15" MBP by spilling water over it. I was planning to replace it with an Apple Silicon machine once they became available, but it's performing so well I'm more than happy to keep using it while waiting for a 15" or 16" M1x/M2. Amazing little machines.

Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Apple's second version of everything is always the one to get. The first version is always exciting, but usually comes at some large expense. - iPhone 2 had 3G and was so much better than 1 - iPad 2 was about 3 X slimmer/lighter than 1 Lots of other examples if I though about it.

What, in your opinion, is the drawback of the M1 product series? I haven’t read many negative reviews.

Don’t get me wrong, it looks great. But so did iPad 1 and iPhone 1, until v2 came out.

The main things I would hope for though are more RAM, and probably a much beefier GPU

Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Apple's second version of everything is always the one to get. The first version is always exciting, but usually comes at some large expense. - iPhone 2 had 3G and was so much better than 1 - iPad 2 was about 3 X slimmer/lighter than 1 Lots of other examples if I though about it.

The original Intel MacBook comes to mind as well - released with the (32-bit) Core Duo processor in May 2006 - replaced with (64-bit) Core 2 Duo model in November 2006 It only was supported through to 10.6 Snow Leopard as 10.7 Lion went 64-bit only

Yes! Good example. I was thinking about that too but couldn’t remember my history enough to explain.

AirPods VS AirPods Pro is another I just remembered

I think watch v2 was a big improvement too.

Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#318

I really want the next MacBook Pro to support driving two 4K monitors over thunderbolt and have an option to buy 32 gigs of ram.

I suspect that the MacBook Pro 16 will probably one of the first M2 offerings and it already offers up to 64g of RAM, so hopefully you’ll get your wish.

This is exactly what I've been waiting for!

Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#319

I really want the next MacBook Pro to support driving two 4K monitors over thunderbolt and have an option to buy 32 gigs of ram.

I would prefer just one 6K or 8K monitor personally at a size of say 55" with a wide ratio. Simpler setup. No post in the middle. Something like this but bigger with higher resolution, and maybe a bit more height vertically (this one is a bit too wide for its height in my opinion): https://www.samsung.com/ca/monitors/gaming/super-ultra-wide-... I think that dual 4K is the old way, single 6K/8K ultra wides are the fut…

Only if I can have a nice tiling WM.

I work on mac all day and on my 1440p widescreen I am constantly trying to put stuff so I can use everything I want to at the same time. `[Code|App|Docs]` is so common we ought to be able to split a wide screen 3 ways the way we do a normal 2.

Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#320
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a laptop?

Maybe the commenter has a very interesting use for it, but why would you buy a 256 GB RAM machine (which isn't a lot of memory for this arena either) to develop the model, instead of using something smaller to work on it and leasing a big cluster for the minutes to hours of the day that you'll need to train it on the actual dataset?

I don't do this kind of thing any more, but back when I did, the one thing that consistently bit me was exploratory analysis requiring one-hot encoding of categorical data where you might have thousands upon thousands of categories. Take something like the Walmart shopper segmentation challenge on Kaggle that a hobbyist might want to take a shot at. That's just exploratory analysis, not model training. Having to do that in the cloud would be quite annoying when your feedback loop involves updating plots that you would really like to have in-memory on a machine connected to your monitor. Granted, you can forward a Jupyter server from an EC2, but also the high-memory EC2s are extremely expensive for hobbyists, way more than just buying your own RAM if you're going to do it often.
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